No Cars Go ♦ Arcade Fire
For me it was when I was about seventeen years old, a time on the cusp between childhood and manhood, when I had it. I suspect that I, like most, only realized that I had it once it was gone. It, was for me, the left over still not dead and buried wonder and awe struck way at looking at the world of a child combined with the potential to leave a mark on the world that comes with being an adult.

On Neon Bible, Arcade Fire’s brilliant follow up to Funeral, Win Butler sings “I don’t want to fight in a holy war, I don’t want the salesman knocking at my door, I don’t want to live in American no more.”

Teenage rebellion sprinkled with the wisdom of an adult.

For those of us living in America, suffering from Lady Macbeth syndrome desperately trying to wash our hands of blood- out out damn spot- the lyrics are a punch to the gut.

And then comes the track No Cars Go to save the day. Promising to take us to a place where no planes go. Where no ships go.

Even Lady Macbeth knows that no matter what crimes we commit under the cover of night- a time must come to go to bed.

“What’s done cannot be undone”, Lady M councils her husband after they killed the King, holding onto her sanity by a thread, “To bed, to bed, to bed.”

And Arcade Fire takes us, in a rollicking, defiant building swirl of drums and xylophone, and french horn and hurdy gurdy out the escape hatch- and flying! An out of body experience between the moment of sleep and waking where we are all invited- to the a remote renovated church in Quebec, a magical place where we are given back that moment in time when we were 17 and anything was possible. A moment between the click of the light and the start of the dream.

Lay down a catchy hook and people will sing along with just about anything. For evidence of this, a recent No Cure For That survey confirmed that 9 out of 10 children of the 80s will, when driving in a car whose radio alights upon Journey’s “Separate Ways”, obediently roll down the windows, turn up the volume and try to match Steve Perry’s falsetto while playing air synthesizer: (Sings) Someday love will find you/ Break those chains that bind you/ One night will remind you/ How we touched/ And went our separate ways!

Every decade has its curse. My generation had mullets, Steve Perry and Iran Contra. Americans coming of age in the ought’s have crocs, Lady Gaga & 9/11. One can only hope in 20 years, high school reunions will not be complete without a raucous sing along of Immortal Technique’s & Mos Def’s “Bin Laden”. I mean, I don’t know if, as Mos Def so seductively bites “Bush knocked down the towers.” I know plenty of lies are told, and facts intentionally obscured. But what can a 3-minute song really do?

Get past the chorus and listen to Immortal Technique, and imagine the kind of cultural mind shift that would have to take place for this song to be a sing along ditty of future parties: And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons/ We sold him that shit, after Ronald Reagan’s election./ Mercenary contractors fightin’ a new era/ Corporate military bankin’ off the war on terror

Imagine a future where these are simple point of facts, rather than something we hide from, anesthetizing ourselves with trinkets from target and vacations by the shore, or breaking down the latest Tiger Woods scandal.

Or listen to Eminem, also featured on the track: I don’t rap for dead presidents/ I’d rather see the president dead/ It’s never been said but I set precedents.

Listen: Any historian will tell you that the world would have been a better place had George Bush been killed before the second invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Just as some cultural force or shadow government or roll of the dice conspired to bring us- in quick succession the political assassinations of JFK, Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert F Kennedy, and just as certainly that resulting pall had the effect of the progressive movement collectively putting their tail between theirs legs for the last several decades while the Imperial reach of the United States Empire has extended its tentacles all over the world.

As the 21st century rolls on, is it not true that we could have imagined a better world if some cultural force or shadow government or roll of the dice existed and conspired to bring us, before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the deaths of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice?

We need more catching hooks carrying all of the knowledge packed into tight 3 minute packages that Immortal Technique packs into his single “Bin Laden.”